Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents the following readers on the theme Underneath August 9 at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7-9pm. $5. Join us for an extraordinary night as seven authors reveal worlds underneath words.

Melissa Cistaro

Melissa Cistaro’s stories have been published in the New Ohio Review, Brevity, Anderbo.com, Sparkle and Blink, the KQED Perspectives series, and in the anthology Cherished: 21 Writers on Animals They Have Loved and Lost. Her essay “The Undertow” was a semi-finalist in Children’s Hospital & Research Center Oakland’s Notes & Words essay contest.

David Corbett

David Corbett is the author of four novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar), and Do They Know I’m Running (Spinetingler Award, Best Novel Rising Star Category 2011). His short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, with two stories selected for Best American Mystery Stories (2009 and 2011). In May 2012, Mysterious Press/Open Road Media re-issued his first two novels plus a story collection in ebook format, and Penguin will publish his textbook on the craft of characterization The Art of Character in January 2013.

Jennifer duBois

Jennifer duBois is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recently completed a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Playboy, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, The Northwest Review, and elsewhere. Her first novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was published by The Dial Press in March 2012.

C.J. Hribal is the author of the novel The Company Car, which received the Anne Powers Book Award, and the novel American Beauty. He’s also the author of the short fiction collections Matty’s Heart and The Clouds in Memphis, which won the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and he edited The Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing from the New World. He has held Fellowships from the NEA, the Bush, and from the Guggenheim Foundations, and has twice won the Sternig Award for Short Fiction. He is the Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University, and is a member of the fiction faculty at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

Kara Levy

Kara Levy’s fiction appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review Prize Issue 2009, TriQuarterly, Zen Monster, Drunken Boat, the Huffington Post, and Narrative, where she was a winner of the 30Below Prize for writers under 30. A graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, she was a recent Steinbeck Fellow in Fiction at the Center for Steinbeck Studies in San Jose. She lives in San Francisco.

Wendy Merrill

Wendy Merrill’s memoir, Falling into Manholes: The Memoir of a Bad/Good Girl (Putnam 2008), was sold at the Maui Writers Conference in 2006. Her personal essays also appear in the anthology Single Woman of a Certain Age (Inner Ocean, 2006) and, Single State of the Union (Seal Press, 2007). She is described by Anne Lamott as “a wonderful new voice — smart, funny, and wildly real.” She founded WAM Marketing Group, a unique marketing communications company based in Sausalito, where she currently lives above ground and beyond her means.

Frances Stroh

Frances Stroh is an installation artist turned writer who lived and worked in London for two years on a Fulbright Grant. She is writing a memoir entitled “Fire-Brewed: The Fall of the Stroh’s Beer Family” about her family who made beer in Detroit for a hundred and fifty years. Her work has appeared in Rosebud and on her blog, Irritable Brain Syndrome. She struggles mightily to employ Twitter in creative ways but enjoys the process.